SchMOOze

Today we visited SchMOOze, a MOO (virtual world - in this case a university) set up by Hunter College in New York. I was delighted with the results, as we were immediately challenged to a game of Boggle by Mehitabel, the university president, who also happens to be a cat (!). It's been a while since I've played Boggle, but I don't think that's much of an excuse for being convincingly thrashed. Lucky for the students, they can say that English isn't their first language!

We all had a great time, it was all we could manage to pass the coffee and biscuits around, whilst logging in and finding our way to the Boggle room (we had a bit of help finding it). The students were very positive about the experience which is great - I wasn't convinced that they would like it, considering everything in SchMOOze is text-based and we rely so heavily on images these days. They all said they would use it again, so I'll have to find out if they make repeat visits. It seems to me that it would give them some good opportunities to use their English which they might not otherwise make.